Her Name Is Katz. She’s A Pet Detective. And She’s Gonna Find Your Missing Dogs

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WWR Article Summary (tl;dr)Katz is a bona fide pet detective. She is a registered private eye with a degree in criminology, has trained her own dogs to catch the scent of missing pets and, arguably key to her success, has mad skills for using new and old media to spotlight her mission.

MIAMI

Jamie Katz and her dad were constantly evicted from apartments. The dog barks from inside their homes were ear-splitting. The stench from litter boxes on balconies, overwhelming.

“He couldn’t say no to me,” said Katz. “And I couldn’t say no to the animals.”

That was about two decades ago and Katz, 36, still can’t say no to the animals, especially missing ones. In the past few weeks alone, Katz, who operates out of a cage-cluttered Fort Lauderdale, Fla., apartment, has helped track down a French bulldog that escaped a yard and a Chihuahua stolen from an animal clinic in South Miami-Dade.

Another French bulldog named Brunno went missing for 180 days, that’s 3 1/2 dog years, before Katz reunited him with owners earlier this year, a body-wagging reunion in Fort Lauderdale caught on video. And last year, she helped basketball legend Michael Jordan’s daughter find her missing Pomeranian.

Katz is a bona fide pet detective. She is a registered private eye with a degree in criminology, has trained her own dogs to catch the scent of missing pets and, arguably key to her success, has mad skills for using new and old media to spotlight her mission.

“Jamie is sharp. Jamie is amazing,” said Emmanuel Laboy, who got his French bulldog Bella back after two agonizing weeks. “And most important, Bella is super happy.”

Katz’s ability to reunite cats, dogs, parrots and even ferrets with their owners, coupled with a recent surge of positive press, has made her South Florida’s most well-known pet detective.